20 February

Getting my head on straight is getting harder and harder the older I get. And let there be no mistake about it, I am getting older than fuck! If I live until July 8th, I will be 85 years old. I used to think living to that age would be a piece of cake but these days I am noticing evidence of little things happening inside of me that might make that a damned hard piece of cake.

I am talking of the nuanced little breakdowns inside of my body that I am sure every human goes through as time passes. Hardly noticed at first, but then a little more nuanced, a little more intense as the days go by — things like my cataracts, for example. Things like it is getting harder to climb a flight of stairs — and I have to hang onto the handrail of the staircase when I descend because I get a little unbalanced by looking at the height I have to descend from. But it is impossible to descend stairs with one’s eyes closed. That would be courting disaster.

In addition to all that I have said so far, there is the matter of trying to sort out the truth from all the information and pseudo-information that is flooding into my brain in this new age of technology. There is news and there is “Fake” news and there is paranoia in almost every corner about which news resource is valid, which news source is unbiased, which news source is rooted and grounded in conspiracy theory. It sometimes gives me a headache just trying to wade through this morass on a daily basis.

My lead principle about sorting out the news and the information I receive is firmly believing that any word proceeding from the mouth of an American radical conservative source is a lie from the beginning to the end; but I have to temper that attitude sometimes and say to myself, “I am not sure there a politician alive today who has the ability to refrain from spinning the truth if it serves a purpose in his or her mind. I am having great difficulties dealing with “Trust” these days because I have become more or less convinced that “Trust” is becoming a very rare commodity.

My faith in the future has become tempered by the realization that, at my advanced age, the “Future” is not as “Promised” as it once was (promised in my own mind of course, because the future is really promised to no one). But at the same time, I am also cynically convinced, at some level, that if there is a future, it will be little more than an enhanced or diminished replay of all that has gone before … and in my way of looking at things that is not much of a future for anybody to look forward to.